Lou Hansen has been a journalist for more than 25 years in New York, Philadelphia, Virginia and Silicon Valley. He was an enterprise and investigative reporter for The Virginian-Pilot, covering politics, criminal justice and the military. In 2019, he co-founded the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO, where he serves as senior editor. He reported and edited the national-award winning series Uprooted, a project with ProPublica that detailed the decades-long displacement of Black communities by Virginia universities. Hansen has won numerous national and state awards for his work. His profile of a teenage gang member, “The Girl Who Took Down the Gang,” was published in a collection of the ten best newspaper narratives of 2012. He was a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University in 2015.